


The Novel That Is

by bold_seer



Category: A Place to Call Home (TV)
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-01 22:43:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16774387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/pseuds/bold_seer
Summary: Friends and family she wouldn’t trade for the world.





	The Novel That Is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [365paperdolls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/365paperdolls/gifts).



**December 1969 - Anna**

Tea at the Swansons’. A little older, a little wiser. Who would’ve thought, ten, fifteen years ago, that the Swansons would one day be Andrew and Olivia?

It’s hot. But, Anna thinks, all the best places in the world are. Her home. Places she’s been. Exciting places she hasn’t been to yet - there’s still that burning desire in her. The first decade of motherhood hasn’t quenched it, her taste for adventure. She has a typewriter and an imagination. She has the reality, as well. A daughter she loves more than anything. Friends and family she wouldn’t trade for the world.

But the _world_. Globetrotting, jet setting, dreams and holidays. Cairo, a stop. Israel, _a_ home for Sarah and David, even for her father. Los Angeles, where she finally went on her own terms. Her latest work, finding its shape, set in Bombay. Or Buenos Aires. Or Burma. _Too_ exciting? To think her parents, her second set of parents - she loved her parents, loved them dearly, but of course she’d entertained the thought as a child, what if she was a secret princess, what if - to get to know them in her twenties, an unexpected Christmas gift - went there on a trek to the past!

“Politics keeps mama busy,” she tells Olivia. Tastes the coconut. Sips her tea, feeling like a proper lady. Thinks of Prudence and her grandmother, Ash Park, where she sat outside with Elaine in her arms. Some things have changed, but some things never change. Her mother still wears trousers, most of the time. Anna has the same figure she had ten years ago. Not that that matters. She’s had a child. But she likes appearing - her best self. For herself. Challenging every expectation of what a single mother, or an unmarried woman, or a woman writer should look like.

“A loss for Sydney. But Carolyn was always a force of change.” Olivia holds her teacup with the dainty, pink roses, radiating her quiet wisdom. She’s come far. English rose, and so much more. “How’s Elaine?”

Well. At school. Beautiful, dutiful and brilliant. But for a moment, Anna remembers _Elaine_ , who never saw her daughter - because that’s who Anna also is - grow up to be a woman who gave birth to a girl. “Oh, she’s a doll. All of Henry’s responsibility. And my –”

“Looks, surely.” Olivia’s demeanour is soft, warm-hearted. Perfect hostess, better friend. “And cleverness.”

Anna smiles at her former sister-in-law, her true sister. “I really am happy for you, Olivia. You know that, don’t you? I may be cynical about marriage, my own marriage, but not about love. Even for Andrew. Who would’ve thought? The cad!”

Olivia smiles back. “Apparently,” she says appeasingly, with fondness, “some of them do grow out of it.” She looks over the lawn to her children, Georgie standing tall already. “Though I think I could’ve been happy. Just Georgie and me, after Matthew.” Turns towards Anna again. “I’d looked for love for so long,” she confesses, “but then I felt only free. To no longer be engaged, how liberating! The chain off my - finger, I suppose.”

“To snagging the next man.” Anna toasts with her tea. “We did wonder, whether you’d thought it through. He was clearly keen on you before. You, though. Sunstroke? Too much champagne?”

“I suspect,” Olivia muses, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes, “that my contentment allowed me to find an even greater happiness for myself.” She considers her words. “I did have Georgie already. And you do well without a husband.”

“Not for a lack of trying!” Her engagement, all the makings of a disaster. Her marriage, sweet wine turned sour. Olivia, who shares some of her experiences. Men who loved them, then didn’t, and disappeared from their lives. Men who could never _love_ them, not in any way that wasn’t painful for all parties, but still care for them. And yes, love them. All other forms of love, often more lasting. “No one could doubt how much Georgie means to you,” she says. “And James - oh!”

There’s her brother, walking towards them, but Olivia doesn’t seem even remotely surprised. “James, what do you say,” she calls out to him, as he gets closer. “We may need your advice to settle something. A mild disagreement from earlier. The fashion.”

Anna rolls her eyes at the co-conspirators, throwing her hands in the air with flamboyance. As if she hasn’t made statements in Dior - in Inverness! “I could throttle you,” she tells her brother, accompanying her threat with a stern gaze. “Not a word.”

“Sis,” he says with a placid smile. Pleased to see her, but not particularly apologetic. “Straight from the Riviera. Or Melbourne.”

“I give up.” Anna shakes her head. “Are we,” she asks, including herself and Olivia, “too old to wear minidresses?”

...

**December 1979 – James**

He’s leaning back in his chair, wearing his hat. The scene could’ve taken place decades ago, but it’s current, in the present. Patterns, colours and materials form a picture in his mind, anticipating the bold trends of the coming years, when his sister’s voice cuts in.

“It’s so much easier to get a divorce these days,” Anna says idly. “The things I have to look up for fiction! I could’ve married and divorced three times by now.” She pauses. “First, the scandalous exposé. To scandalously unmarried. To scandalously -” She waves her hand, the French manicure.

“Feminist,” James joins in the conversation.

“Look at it this way,” says William. His William, Olivia’s William, Uncle William - just William. “You were eventually going to run out of relatives and friends whose stories you could write. Why not widen your horizons? France is full of people in need of a divorce. Most of them not French.”

“Horrid.” Anna chews on a grape, slowly, stubbornly, in a way that should appear comical for a woman, a _person_ of a certain age. She can barely contain her laughter. “And I flew all the way here! Don’t think I won’t tell Olivia everything.”

But James has already penned her a letter, the latest comings and goings. No secrets between them, even on the opposite sides of the world.

Anna adjusts her sunglasses, the white frames, as ladylike as ever. “We are never too old for gossip.”

...

**December 1999 – Olivia**

“It’s the strangest thing,” she says, looking at the droplets forming on the window. The strangest thing to be here, Ash Park, but that’s not what she means. “Our children are much older than we were when we met. Or had them.”

“Age is a number. For some. I think Henry is finally moving to Harry’s farm,” Anna comments. “Full time.” Time is no threat to her tongue, though she speaks, of course, with affection. Anna lays her glass on an empty table. “At the risk of sounding like the worst stereotype - whatever happened to her bohemian youth - my daughter is a barrister. Her father, a surgeon. A doctor. My father was a politician, a diplomat. Papa, a doctor. And I can never work out if any or all of those are incredibly interesting careers.” She pauses for a second. “Or incredibly boring.”

“It does sound stuffy,” Olivia agrees, “but at least Harry is a farmer.”

“Sarah was a nurse,” Anna points out. “A diplomat’s wife, turned diplomat herself. Running Ash Park. My _mother_ -” She looks disbelieving, but immensely proud. How to begin to narrow down what Carolyn accomplished? “The MP.”

“And Andrew -”

“Of course,” Anna says, not a second thought. “He was a good man.”

Olivia thinks about it for a moment. “I’m not always quite sure what my children do. Or their children. But I believe they’re happy with their lives.”

The things that last. Family and friendship and - love.

“All that Sarah has seen this century.” Anna’s eyes are sad and serious, her tone equally so. “That is a novel.” She sounds almost horrified at the conclusion, turning those painful experiences into a book anyone could buy or borrow, but with a writer’s commitment to the truth. Sometimes dressed up as fiction.

“It is. I spoke with -” Olivia hesitates. Thinks of the horrors and great tragedies of the century, alongside which her own petty complaints dwindle and disappear. “But sometimes I wonder. If I was young now, should I make something more of myself?” She has worn pearls since she was fifteen. Is that what her life has been like, all these years? Looking and acting respectable. A wife. Mother. Grandmother. “Is this enough?”

“Oh, Livvy!” Anna’s voice is sympathetic. “No one thinks it isn’t.”

Olivia dismisses her concerns. She was never Carolyn or Sarah, those remarkably brave women. Free spirits, fiercely independent. She’s had different experiences than Anna, who carved her own path, no matter what, determined to succeed. But she has made her own choices, as well. And she has no regrets. Changing the subject, she says, “Georgie promised to send me pictures from Hawaii. By mail? I never really realise how many decades have passed. How old I am. How old everyone else is. And then I think, remember when we wrote letters?”

Anna, ever lively, lets out a laugh. “Typing is easier.” A woman who was so much ahead of her time still keeps up with the times. “I have to show you my computer. It’s a miracle worker. You know, a writer never really retires.”

Nor do they. Hopefully. Not entirely, not for a while yet.

Olivia looks at the rain falling down, remembering all the men and women in her life. In Inverness and elsewhere. James, of course. And Andrew. Her brother and her parents. Elizabeth, whose presence is still missed, even after this many decades. Prudence, who became dear to her. George. Carolyn and Jack. Roy Briggs. Doris Collins. So many more names, some of them people she hasn’t thought of in years. Who left much earlier. Rose, who looked after Georgie. Gino, did he have children? With Rose, anyone else? Regina Bligh, in all her ambiguity. Bligh by marriage, in name only, and yet, in some odd sense, undeniably Bligh. Douglas, the great love of Elizabeth’s life. And Matthew, if he ever made peace with himself. His family.

She thinks of all the people in her life now. Her children and their families. Friends she has made along the way. Their children. Henry and Harry, whose ties to James she approved and disapproved of. Who played some part in his life, but a greater part in their own adventure, which has only begun. Of Sarah, the strongest woman she knows. Who told her, once, to look for strength inside herself. Her dearest friend, standing beside her.

A toast to the next ten years, thinks Olivia, and she looks at Anna and says, “To friendship that never ends.”


End file.
